Thursday 10 March 2011 03.00 EST
First published on Thursday 10 March 2011 03.00 EST

There was an extraordinary, lingering few minutes of radio on the Today programme (Radio 4) yesterday, in Africa correspondent Andrew Harding's report from the Ivory Coast.

There were several layers to its impact. First, it was a story about a country heading into the abyss of probable civil war in Africa, but wasn't Libya. The head of Save the Children's operations in the country said he feared that Ivory Coast "will become a very large emergency that's forgotten". It also had an immediacy and directness: "Good morning from a very edgy, unpredictable city," Harding began. "Let me give you a flavour of what it's like to move around Abidjan".

He described being turned back from a roadblock in a lawless part of the city, his car quickly surrounded by a thousand young men, "some of them with guns and knives, and none of them looking friendly". He then played two clips: the sound from a mobile phone recording of a jeering crowd watching two men being burned alive, and then, thankfully drowning it out, Harding's recording of women protesting against Laurent Gbagbowith song, posters and candles. Their voices were fierce and brave. "They may kill us but we are determined," one woman cried, backed by a haunting chorus of protest in song that stayed with me all day.